Part 2, aka Varsity Blues

I’ve been quite literally tied up with studies/assignments/exams until last week. I had booked a nervous breakdown to commence immediately after the last exam, but I had to delay it until I’d caught up on the clients who had been told “Don’t ring me for two weeks unless it’s the apocalypse!”

So I think I’ll have a wee whine now & get it off my chest.

Do you know what sucks? Getting A+ on both assessments, but despite that the final exam is worth 60% of the total grade. Fine, okay, that’s the breaks.. except you get yourself in SUCH a state going in, that you’re literally throwing up, shaking like a leaf & totally convincing yourself you won’t even remember the basic accounting equation. This is the first true exam you’ve sat since School Certificate back in ’79. Lots of reassurances from Wayne & family slid straight off my back – I knew I was going to stuff it up.

So I get there.. and as soon as I started reading the paper I realized “Oh! I KNOW all this stuff! Awesome! There’s only one tricky bit, but that’s okay. Right! Let’s go!”

You should see my exam paper.. it’s got little happy faces next to most the questions.

So away I went, grinning like that Cheshire cat. Hit the biggest section first because that’s worth 41 marks, allowed an hour for it but got it done in 50 minutes. Great.. oh.. not great. Damn thing doesn’t balance. Shit. That’s not how it went in my practice runs!

Ah well, crack on to the other exam stuff, and come back to it. Do Not Stress.

Hit the theory questions. Pretty sure I aced those. Standard stuff about taxes, auditing, cash flows etc. No wucking forries… oh ow.. what’s that..?

Oh no, don’t you DARE.. oh shit shit shit this is not good not good!

An hour and a half into the exam, my RSI came back with a vengeance.

And brought some friends.

I had no painkillers on me, because I believed the letter that said “You are not allowed to eat in the examination room”.

I had to rewrite the big section because I’d done it on rough paper, and hadn’t yet put in the niceties like “Blah Blah trading as Blankety Blanks Balance Sheet as at 31 March 2007”, nor were things “neatly” in columns, and there was lots of scribble. Nope, not markable quality, but I knew to attach the workings because our tutor had specifically asked us to.

So four big pages had to be neatly transcribed into the booklet with a bung arm, and a hand that kept insisting on cramping into a fist.

I did not get finished. By my calculation at least 28 marks can be removed straight off the top before they start marking my exam, which is going to drag my A+ average right down to a C.. IF I am lucky.

Serves me right for having the Chutzpah to feel smug about my run of A+. That will teach me.

On the other hand, the other paper I did this semester was Information Systems & Technology, and yes in both the assignments on that one I also got A+. But when I went into the exam, I knew it was worth 30% of the final grade (basically get your 40% of the exam & you’ve passed, so no sweat. 20 marks are multichoice alone!)

I was stacked to the gills with painkillers & anti-inflammatories, but felt much more confident despite being the only gal in the room doing this paper. The guys looked at me strangely, and even more strangely when I finished with an hour to spare. I was having a self-congratulatory smoke outside when one came up to me & asked me what I thought.

“How did you get on with Question 5?” he asked.
“You mean ‘what is homeplug’?
“Yeah!”
“Stuffed if I know, mate. I’ve never heard of it, so I just wrote a heap of blather, figuring I might as well, because you can’t fluke any marks at all if you leave it blank. What did you say it was?”
“Um.. nothing. I didn’t know either. I left it blank.”
“Damn..”
“Yeah.”

(Homeplug, btw, is a type of internet connection that comes in via your electrical wiring. It was one obscure sentence buried in the core text that it seems all of us overlooked. Ah well.. I didn’t bullshit too much with the rest J

I get my results next month. I reckon I maintained my grade for IS&T, but we’ll wait & see what happens with Accounting. I almost wish I hadn’t known the answers, because knowing & not being able to get it down on paper is a bloody cruel thing indeed.

Bah! Roll on Statistical Analysis next semester J Just one at a time from now on, though!